Thursday, 28 November 2013

Thanksgiving post: thank you, 2013

The beautiful SCBWI launch party cake

Last weekend I went to the SCBWI conference in Winchester. I
met (and re-met) a lot of amazing authors and illustrators, and fell in love
all over again with children’s literature and the people involved in creating
it. The great thing about SCBWI (and here’s my unashamed plug for it – it’s a
wonderful support network and anyone interested in children’s books should join it)
is that its membership is open to both published and aspiring authors, and so
there’s an amazing mix of people at every stage of the writing journey. And
talking to all of those different people reminded me of two things that seem
particularly relevant today.

The first is how much can change in a very short space of
time. Last year I wasn’t at the SCBWI conference. I wasn’t even a member. I was
sitting on my couch, jealously reading the tweets from Winchester and feeling
light-years away from that world. I couldn’t possibly have imagined that this
year I’d not only go, but go as a
soon-to-be-published author.

I am so lucky – I am soso lucky that I spend quite a lot of
time these days walking around in a state of intense, surreal wonder at what
has happened to me – but what being at the conference really brought home to me
is that the dream I’m living isn’t just mine. It belongs to every single one of
the conference attendees, and for some of them that dream feels just as far
away as it did for me a year ago.

I’ve had a lot of good news to post on the blog this year,
and I have an astronomical amount to be thankful for today. But part of why this feels so wonderful is
that it’s such a contrast to where I was a year ago.

Last autumn – and this is hard to write about, but I feel
that it’s important that I do – I was lost. I was applying for a lot of jobs,
and being rejected from every one. To distract myself from the relentless
soul-sucking process, I began to query the manuscript of Murder Most Unladylike with agents – and again, I was rejected, a
lot. In retrospect, this was not the smartest plan, because it made me really
start to question my writing ability. I saw those rejections as proof that I
just wasn’t good enough. I distinctly remember one particular phone call I made
to my mother, in which I stood in the middle of that wobbly bridge outside the
Tate Modern and shouted, “MY ENTIRE LIFE IS A LIE! MY WRITING IS AWFUL! I WILL
NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING! I MIGHT AS WELL JUST GIVE UP AND BECOME A VAGRANT!”

I was not in a good place. By the time December rolled
around, I felt profoundly that I had failed. My boyfriend drove us to my parents’
house for Christmas (he had a really hard time getting me in the car, actually,
because I kept trying to persuade him to let me get on a train and spend
Christmas in a Travelodge in York. No, I don’t understand it either), and when
he parked I sat in the car for an hour,
refusing to get out, because I was so deeply ashamed of myself.

In fact, I had not failed in the slightest. I just hadn’t
succeeded yet. Because what I didn’t know (obviously), was this: at that
moment, at literally the lowest point of my adult life, my future was right there in front of me. Nineteen days after my weird sit-in
protest in the car, Gemma Cooper (the woman who is now my wonderful agent) sent
me an email to say that she loved my book and she wanted to meet me. And that
book, the one that I was pretty close to giving up on is, er, about to be
published in May.

What I want to say to other writers is this: publishing is a game with
crazily bad odds. Writing is a tough dream to have. But that’s true for
everyone. Everyone goes through the same rejections, and low times, and self-doubt.
I’m realising now that published authors have everything in common with that
person scribbling alone in their room and dreaming of getting their books read
by someone who isn’t their mother or their dog. They’re just a few steps
further along the same road.

Here, have some cranberry sauce!

If you don’t have an agent yet, or if you’ve been on
submission for approximately 23,345,210 years without a bite from publishers, please
don’t give up. You never know what might be just around the corner. If I had
decided to chuck it all in that day in December 2012, this year would never
have happened. You just never know when your work is going to pay off. For me,
it was this year. For a lot of the SCWBI conference attendees I met, it’s still in
the future. But it will happen.

I have had the most wonderful year. I can’t say it enough. But part of why it's so special is because of what came before it. What I've learnt is that you never know when you're about to be happy.

About Me

Girl, 26, book reader, book writer, book reviewer, book lover.
Repped by Gemma Cooper at the Bent Agency.
My first book, MURDER MOST UNLADYLIKE, will be published by Corgi in the UK in May 2014, and in the USA by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers in spring 2015.